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Thursday, December 20, 2007

Fountain Man: Stealing the Illusion or Padding the End of Year Numbers

This is a picture I took on my cellphone last night. The picture was taken at the mall and the mall employee has drained the fountain and is using a high power vacuum cleaner to suck up the coins from the fountain.

Mind you, this picture was taken around 7pm. The surrounding food court is packed, and every one can her the loud clanking of coins being sucked into this super-powered vacuum cleaner. If you were a child seeing this, this would certainly ruin any illusion that you could make a wish and throw a coin in the fountain.

I don't really know why they were doing this when the mall was busy?

Also, the fountain wasn't super-packed with money...you can get a sense from the picture how he's vacuumed up some of the left side and top tiers of the fountain, but the right side has not been touched.

It made me wonder if the mall was trying to pad their end of the year financial statement, or they desperately needed to make a little extra money to pay Santa Clause for his last week, or maybe the light bill needed paying? And this employee got sent to be the destroyer of dreams, taking all the money out of the fountain to be cut out of the vacuum bag.

When I was in college, I worked at Walt Disney World and one afternoon "backstage" I saw the three little pigs heads sitting in a row on the ground while the actors were getting suited up. It was really creepy. Kind of like seeing all the coins in the fountain just being sucked up. What a weird thing to do during shopping hours.

I have a small side company in Dallas that cleans and banks fountain coins. We charge 25% plus shipping. Take a quick look at http://fountaincoins.com/.

Most of my customers remove the coins after closing. They wouldn't dream of having work going during business hours. Maybe that was not a very ritzy mall.

My company started as a hobby of collecting tokens and foreign coins.It is not a big moneymaker but it is fun for me and the service gets the funds moving to those charity beneficiaries.Walt McKay, waltdj0014@aol.com

check out fountaincoins.blogspot.com to find out what to do with those dirty fountain coins. Or check out FountainCoins.com. The company will be featured on The History Channel's "Modern Marvels" TV show on Nov 12, 2010 at 8:00PM CST.

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